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Generating first names based on race/ethnicity

I want to generate some fake people for a piece of software I'm writing. These people also have ethnicities, and I'd prefer not to have names that don't look totally out of place when compared to those ethnicities.

My first idea was to base it on data. There is a table of first and last names from the 1990 US census with attached frequencies, but that says nothing about ethnicity. There is also a table of last names from the 2000 US census which is broken down by ethnicity, but it says nothing about first names.

So I need some way of generating first names based on ethnicity. Any ideas?

Solution

  • Use behindthename.com. They have very extensive lists of names by usage, including lists of popular names.